I’m thrilled to have a new essay at Full Grown People today. It’s about a blanket my mother was making when she died that I don’t know how to finish. Every time I look at the unfinished blanket, I feel kind of sad and inadequate, like an unworthy link in my family story. Why didn’t my mother ever teach me how to crochet so I could finish the damn thing? I sat with the story for a long time, and it was only recently that I thought of the story (and the blanket) in a different way: as part of an immigrant narrative I so rarely assign to my mother. She *was* an immigrant (even though I never really thought of her as one) and, as in all immigrant stories, something always gets left behind.
I feel better about it now. I might not ever finish the blanket, but I have this essay. And that’s something.
“The blanket, still in pieces, sits in a bag in my attic. I take it down sometimes, run my fingers over the soft white cotton, yellow now with age. If I let my eyes blur, I can almost see my mother crocheting in front of the T.V., a cigarette and glass of white wine on the nightstand beside her. Her needle moves in a jerky, seemingly haphazard way, but when it stops, a delicate white hexagon appears. Later, she will crochet these hexagons together to create the piece of blanket I am holding now.”
Read more here!